Tomshardware.com just built a budget gaming PC for $500 that benchmarks higher than my PC that I spent over $1500 on 2 years ago, and it’s still chugging along pretty fast.
Not to downplay ANYTHING Goliath said, because it was all wonderful information, but if you want more details on building your own PC IM me on aim or msn and I’ll be happy to give you a basic rundown of all the details you need to consider for building your own PC.
Oh, and btw, I recently built a PC for a friend specifically for gaming/recording. He’s a professional sound engineer and wanted to be able to use his main PC for using with his studio gear AND still play the latest games.
His final cost was around $1800 with tax and shipping. I’d have put it up any $2500 store bought computer at the time. And I bought components that take well to overclocking so he’s got another 50-100%+ of performance lying in wait in some of those components. The graphics card could be overclocked a good 30%, and the processor could be overclocked at least 70%, both reliably while maintaining cheap air cooled solutions. Overclocked it would probably keep up with a $3,000 alienware.
For recording there’s going to be 3 main places to spend money:
1) Processor – You need lots of maths to chug out those numbers for audio editing software and plugins
2) RAM – Last thing you want is to run out of ram, and audio editing can take up a lot. Even as important is the SPEED of the ram, as you’re shooting for as low of latency in your work as possible.
3) Hard Drives – Audio editing takes SPACE like you would not believe. It’s not as bad as video editing, but you can expect projects to easily reach over a GB of space. If you plan on doing a lot of recording plan to have lots of storage or expect to throw away your workfiles once they’ve been completed for a while.
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